By now everyone understands that the cloud is indeed a place on Earth, but there still seems to be confusion around why global expansion by way of adding data centers is such a big deal. After all, if data is stored “in the cloud,” why wouldn’t adding more servers in our existing data centers suffice? Well, there’s a much more significant reason for adding more data centers than just being able to host more data.

Data can travel across the Internet quickly, but just like anything, the farther something has to go, the longer it will take to get there. Seems pretty logical right? But we also need to take into account that not all routes are created equally. So to deliver the best network performance, we designed our global network to get data to the closest route possible to our network. Think of each SoftLayer PoP as an on-ramp to our global network backbone. The sooner a user is able to get onto our network, the quicker we can efficiently route them through our PoPs to a server in one of our data centers. Furthermore, once plugged into the network, we are able to control the flow of traffic.

Let’s take a look at this traceroute example from the abovementioned blog post. As you are probably aware, a traceroute shows the "hops" or routers along the network path from an origin IP to a destination IP. When we were building out the Singapore data center (before the network points of presence were turned up in Asia), the author ran a traceroute from Singapore to SoftLayer.com, and immediately after the launch of the data center, ran another one.

After the Singapore data center launch, the number of hops was reduced by 50 percent, and the response time (in milliseconds) was reduced by 40 percent. Those are pretty impressive numbers from just lighting up a couple PoPs and a data center, and that was just the beginning of our global expansion in 2012.

That’s why we are so excited to announce the three new data centers launching this month: Mexico City, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.

Of course, this is great news for customers who require data residency in Mexico, Japan, and Germany. And yes, these new locations provide additional in-region redundancy within APAC, EMEA, and the Americas. But even customers without servers in these new facilities have reason to celebrate: Our global network backbone is expanding, so users in these markets will see even better network stability and speed to servers in every other SoftLayer data center around the world!

As 2014 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on another exciting year: our proudest moments, smartest innovations, and continued growth. It’s been an incredible year being part of IBM, and we continue to broaden our reach while adding new capabilities to our portfolio of cloud services.

SoftLayer’s IaaS platform has become the centerpiece of IBM’s cloud portfolio, providing a scalable, secure base for the global delivery of IBM’s cloud services, spanning extensive middleware and SaaS solutions. IBM has either built or bought 100 cloud properties over the last five years, and SoftLayer is the foundation or the piece that brings it all together.

Expanding our Global Footprint
In January, IBM announced its $1.2 billion commitment to expand its global cloud footprint, including plans to open 15 new SoftLayer data centers. Our first data center to open in 2014 was in Hong Kong, followed by London, Toronto, Melbourne, and Paris, with more to follow. We also launched two data centers for U.S. government workloads in Ashburn, Virginia and one in Dallas, Texas. These data centers are reserved for government customers and will be certified for U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance.

With our new international facilities, we’ve tripled our footprint in Europe and Asia. Expanding our physical presence in these geographies gives our customers SoftLayer solutions for workloads and data that need to remain local, while providing additional data redundancy options within key regions around the world. With our data centers and points of presence (PoPs) combined, SoftLayer is on track for world domination.

Hourly Bare Metal
Our bare metal cloud differentiates us by providing an ideal solution for the toughest workloads in the cloud, including big data and analytics that require high performance. For more than 10 years, we’ve been refining, pioneering, and innovating our bare metal cloud. This year we unveiled a new offering: new bare metal servers that are deployed in less than 30 minutes and billed by the hour. These hourly bare metal servers provide the raw performance of physical servers with shorter commitments, making it easier than ever to deploy computing-intensive workloads on SoftLayer at will.

Growth
In 2014, we’ve continued to experience incredible growth. Since being acquired by IBM, SoftLayer has added thousands of new customers at an average rate of 1,000 new accounts per month. To match our aggressive business growth, our employee base is expanding as well.

“We expected to almost double this year, and to almost double again next year," said SoftLayer COO Francisco Romero. “In Dallas, SoftLayer expects to hire workers to fill 250 new jobs by the end of 2015.”

In order to accommodate our growing employee population, we’ll be relocating our Dallas headquarters to a new space early next year.

We look forward to serving you from our new address, 14001 North Dallas Parkway.

A key driver behind any startup looking to score funding from these big boys is the ability to handle unpredictable growth and achieve scale rapidly. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at how we are helping our startup customers grow, scale, and succeed in Asia.

Drawing Board Events
It is hard and stressful planning a party for someone else’s big day. Birthday parties, wedding showers, and retirement parties take a lot of planning and attention to detail. The corporate world has its own set of events and challenges. That's why when I met Terence Woo at one of the startup meet-ups recently, his new venture, Drawing Board Events, made me sit up and say, “Now, that's what I need.”

After sifting online through vendor after vendor for his own wedding and calling each individually, Terence had a brilliant idea. Two years later, alongside co-founder, Samuel Stacey, he created a one-stop shop where users can browse user-reviewed vendors by categories: venues, décor, flowers, photography, cakes, and so on. After completing a quick five-minute event detail eform, users can simply click on “request quote” from as many vendors as they like. Vendors receive the request, and then quotes are emailed back—saving users the hours spent calling different vendors and providing the details over and over again.

According to Terence, right from the onset, Drawing Board Events decided to go the way of the cloud. There was no question that to achieve scale they needed a strong, reliable and flexible infrastructure. I asked him to give me three reasons why cloud is working for them, and here is what he shared:

A highly competitive industry needs a quick turnaround time.
Provisioning of events services is a highly competitive, though traditionally slow to innovate, market. Focusing on a collection of sub-industries (photography, décor, flowers, and so forth) as opposed to a single vertical market, requires housing the latest information in one location. By giving the service provider ownership over its own profile, the company is incentivized to keep its data up-to-date. Additionally, ensuring that the users are able to access updated information in real time requires a highly reliable platform.

A growing database depends on a growing IT infrastructure.
Data storage is infrastructure-hungry; there are no two ways about that. And as a business grows, so does its data. In order for Drawing Board Events to collect information on all event sub-industries, vast databases need to be housed and maintained. These databases can be stored, computed, and managed easily via the cloud. Sometimes the computing and storage needs fluctuate, and because the cloud is scalable, Drawing Board Events can add or subtract storage when and where it is required. The company needs powerful servers to handle its database workloads, as well as a cloud environment flexible enough to scale with its business.

The Catalyst Startup Program got them what they needed.
Drawing Board Events joined Catalyst after their business idea formalized and was structured. With SoftLayer, they were able to quickly host the website and access storage solutions best suited for their growing business. As a member of the program, they now have access to SoftLayer’s complete portfolio of services and can hop on SoftLayer's global network backbone.

Although currently in the pilot stage, the startup has a huge list of subscribers who are finding the website an exciting and helpful way to plan events. Moving forward, Terence is hoping to add a real-time booking system for users ready to make buying decisions, as well as develop a more robust, proprietary communications dashboard for users and vendors. He also hinted at some exciting upcoming innovations that will need a heavy tech foundation and greater dependency on the cloud.

Even though I couldn't pry all the details from him, I am already sold and can see myself as the official party planner for my family—that is, of course, with the help of Drawing Board Events. The best thing is that I’ll have over 14 categories to choose from and more than 250 service providers at my fingertips. Planning a party just got easier. Just imagine if I had to contact all those vendors—now that ain't no party my friend!

From banking to social media to gaming, the amount of accounts we have today is growing out of control. Let’s be honest—it’s easy to use the same password or a variation of the same password for all online accounts, but if a hacker can break one of those passwords, they are one step closer to hacking every account.

Who really has the memory to store all those passwords anyway?

That’s where a password manager can help. It controls access by storing (online or locally) every password in an encrypted file that is only accessible by one strong master password.

When a user wants access to their SoftLayer account for example, the password manager will ask for the master password instead of the SoftLayer account password. It automatically populates the username and password fields and logs in.

Password managers are very convenient, but more importantly they enhance security because of the ability to use longer and harder passwords without worrying about forgetting or writing them down on sticky notes posted to a desktop screen.

Do I need a cross-platform password manager?
Today, most people access the same accounts on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. If that’s you, then yes, you need a cross-platform solution. These Web-based options require yearly subscriptions upwards of $50 for a single user. The convenience of logging in anywhere might be steep, but the additional features might make it worth it. Password managers like Dashlane, LastPass, 1Password, and mSecure offer:

Secure storage of bank cards and any identity cards like driver licenses

Password generators

Keystroke logger protection

Automatic backup

Multifactor authentication like biometrics or a token

Access to pre-determined contacts in case of emergency or death

Team password sharing (the team lead controls the master password for a single account like a FedEx account and grants access via the users individual password manager)

Do I need a locally-based password manager?
If you’re not comfortable storing passwords online or you just use your desktop to access accounts, choose a password manager that encrypts and stores passwords on your PC. This option is the least convenient but most secure. All password managers listed above come in the locally-based option for free or at a fraction of the cross-platform price.

User Error
Although much more secure than not using one, password managers do have some downfalls (that stem from user error). Just like any password, you still need to change your master password regularly, never share passwords with anyone, and once installed, a user should update existing passwords with really hard forgettable passwords or use a password generator for each online account.

And always remember to lock your computer or mobile device when not in use. Although password managers make it harder for hackers to virtually access your accounts, they do not protect against someone physically opening the file.

It’s also a good idea to check settings to ensure that when booting or waking up your device, the password manager requires you to re-enter the password.

Pa$$word1 ain’t cutting it.
If you’re not ready to commit to a password manager, think about the consequences the next time you are prompted to update your password. Adding a “1” to the end of your current password isn’t safe or smart.

We’ve all been there, and committing to a password manager in some cases is expensive and setting one up can be time consuming depending on the amount of accounts, so I understand the hesitation. But it’s worth it for that added layer of protection and security.

We support more than 50 accelerator programs in the Global Accelerator Network, the TechStars programs, five hundred startups, and more. We hold office hours, offer pitch practice, and attend demo days—in short, we hear a lot of pitches.

Condensing the essence of how you’re changing the world into a five minute sales pitch, while still including other key elements like the business model, traction, early wins, team, and “the ask” is incredibly difficult. There’s a lot of ground to cover and very little time to do it, especially when you consider that likely half of your audience is focused on their phones.

A pitch must be concise, informative, and attention grabbing. The worst thing you can do is pitch like George Lucas’ dialogue in the Star Wars prequel trilogy movies—clumsy and over-explaining.

Yoda: Always two there are, no more, no less, a master and an apprentice.

Mace Windu: But which was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?

This particular quote is the epitome of terrible dialogue because it communicates the same thing multiple times; the second line is superfluous. I don’t need Mace Windu to re-explain to me exactly what Yoda just said. I have ears. I’m paying attention. Imagine how much more powerful that scene would be with just the first statement.

Most of us have a natural tendency to over-explain a point, but by doing this, we insult the intelligence of our audience. Plus, over-explaining eats up precious time and causes the crowd to disengage. I can’t think of a worse combination.

If you find yourself saying any of these phrases, cut them immediately:

Let me show you . . .
I’d like to tell you . . .
I’m going to . . .
I think . . .
For example . . .
As I said before . . .

George Lucas did write some great lines of dialogue. Watch the Dagobah scenes in Empire Strikes Back. Yoda’s lines are pure brilliance. The message is simple and powerful, which makes it one of the most memorable lines in cinema.

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

During a pitch, you’re not writing a screenplay, so you don’t want to leave your audience guessing, but you still need to explain the problem, the solution, and why you’re the best at solving it. Don’t leave your audience confused from a lack of information, but don’t insult their intelligence by telling them you’re going to tell them something. Just tell it. Or better yet, show it.

You want your pitch to be like a Lightsaber: an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Dallas came into existence prior to the country of Texas being admitted into the United States. From its early origins, Dallas prided itself on being on the cutting edge of business.

When the railroads began crisscrossing the country to take people north and south and east and west, Dallas quickly positioned itself as the center of activity—no railroad company could pass that up.

Over the next one hundred years, Dallas developed markets that influenced the end destinations of goods around the country and around the world. Then, as technology began to develop, Dallas followed suit. Texas Instruments became a leader in semi-conductors, and Telecom Corridor moved communications to new levels.

As other parts of the world grew their own specialties and opportunities, Dallas, outside the spotlight of other advancements in business and technology around the world, quietly plodded along and avoided the large swings other economies endured.

As recently as 2010, the entrepreneurial scene in Dallas was quiet, and there was little direction in advancing it. That was then . . .

In the last 18 months, the Dallas startup ecosystem has seen a magnificent transformation. The cobwebs have cleared, groups have organized, and the drumbeat of expansion is resonating across the four corners of the DFW Metroplex.

From Fort Worth to McKinney and Denton to Dallas, new companies are coming to life like never before. At the heart of this is a community—a community of people and companies collaborating to develop relationships, create and hold events, provide mentoring support, and drive a forward-thinking approach to sustain and grow the ecosystem.

Dallas-based SoftLayer plays a vital role in this resurgence of the Dallas startup community. Beyond monetary support of events, the Catalyst program is a revolutionary force across all startup communities around the world with a unique blend of services, programs, and one-on-one mentoring. SoftLayer has committed to the growth of the Dallas startup community by investing in community leaders, plugging into local programs, providing free services, and developing relationships that will not only grow revenue for SoftLayer over time but will tightly bond startups with the corporate world in a way that provides benefit to the overall economy.

It is important for SLayers and IBMers to get involved in what is going on in the startup ecosystem in Dallas; every week, events and sessions provide opportunities to network or learn how to build a company. Go build those relationships; either personally or professionally. These relationships build benefits extending beyond work. Learn about events via online sources like LaunchDFW or Startup Digest. If outside Dallas, other communities will have similar listings. Look for ways to get tied into incubators (The Dallas Entrepreneur Center) and accelerators (Techwildcatters, VentureSpur). The local universities and other corporate entities also hold events and courses.

The evolution of business in Dallas is unique and will continue to grow. A business friendly state that supports low taxes, low cost of living, easy access to strong technical resources, leads on capital, and the ability to get from DFW to anywhere in the U.S. (or the world for that matter) in just hours keeps the “freight train” picking up speed. It’s a destination for companies to start and grow businesses, and it is so much fun to see.

‘Tis the season for holiday shopping, but is your online business ready to handle the rush?

According to the IBM Digital Analytics 2013 Holiday Benchmark Reports, Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday recorded the highest online sales period on record—up 16.5 percent from 2012. Thanksgiving Day online sales grew by 19.7 percent, and Black Friday online sales increased 19 percent. But Cyber Monday still came in as the biggest online shopping day in history with a 20.6 percent increase in online sales.

And although many are rejoicing this holiday season over the improved economy, managing the infrastructure changes to accommodate the influx of users can cause strain on IT departments. Dealing with crashed sites, slow loading pages, and system backlogs take away time from focusing on growing a business. They are also major complaints of online shoppers.

It might seem counterintuitive, but these problems are good signs that business is doing well. To keep customers happy and coming back, it’s best to avoid Internet lag. With Auto Scale you can deliver an optimal user experience regardless of the volume of traffic or amount of resource usage.

How does it work?
Auto Scale automatically scales up and adds servers to meet high traffic demands providing a smooth running site or scales down so you’re not paying for what you’re not using. For our existing customers, access the customer portal to customize Auto Scale in three simple steps:

Define a Group: Determine which servers you would like to scale in which data centers.

Set a Policy: Establish rules for adding and removing virtual servers from your environment.

Define a Trigger: Create schedule- or usage-based triggers that provision or de-provision virtual servers based on your policies.

Based on last year’s results, online sites would do well to set a policy to add extra servers—depending on the size of business, maybe that’s 10, 20, or 100 servers. Setting triggers when traffic increases around 7:30 in the morning and during high traffic, after-work hours will keep consumers from experiencing unnecessary lag.

Spend money on gifts, not on underutilized capacity.
The last thing you need this time of year is another bill. Auto Scale is free (mostly). You only pay for the servers you need, when you need them. And you can change the group, policy, or trigger in the customer portal anytime. You’re not locked into any long term plans.

The unofficial start of the holiday shopping season kicks off this week.
If you haven’t already Auto Scaled your cloud environment, it’s time to do it. Set up Auto Scale here.

To get in touch with our customers in China, we have planned a series of activities in Beijing. From hands-on workshops to large conferences, we have something for everyone.

Technical Workshop

Riding on the success of our SoftLayer Asia Roadshow in October, we are excited to announce that we are extending the workshop to China. Partnering with e27 and TechNode, we hope to continue helping developers understand the benefits of the cloud and teaching how to make businesses scalable with the SoftLayer environment.

Designed as a half-day workshop with SoftLayer product and technical mentors, attendees will interact with instructors learning how SoftLayer solutions scale and perform the way they do. The greater China roadshow will stop in three cities:

Beijing — November 25, 2014

Shenzhen — December 11, 2014

Taipei — December 18, 2014

Customer Meetups

To wrap up each technical workshops, we invite current SoftLayer customers and business partners to a relaxing evening of cocktails, dinner, music, and socializing. We’ll be sharing exciting news about our upcoming data centers in Asia—you won’t want to miss it!

Dinner is on us, so let us know if you can make it.

Conference Sponsorship

SoftLayer is excited to sponsor two main conferences in Beijing this November. They are:

Remember the days when cellular companies charged additional fees for calls placed during peak hours or for text messages that exceeded your plan?

The good news is those days are pretty much over for cellular services thanks to unlimited text and data plans. The bad news is there are cloud and hosting providers who adhere to those same old billing practices of charging customers for every single communication their severs send or receive.

At SoftLayer we do things differently. All of our servers come with included terabytes of outbound bandwidth—5TB for virtual servers and 20TB for bare metal servers. Now you probably just noticed I specifically mentioned outbound bandwidth, and that's because we don't charge anything, nothing, zip, zilch for all traffic inbound to any of our servers, nor do we charge for any bandwidth usage across our Global Private Network.

Imagine the possibilities of what you could build on a Global Private Network that essentially comes free of charge just by being a SoftLayer customer.

How about building that true disaster recovery solution that you’re always talking about?

How about moving all of your backups offsite now that the necessary bandwidth requirements and costs aren’t standing in your way?

Or maybe it’s time to offer your app a little GSLB now that replicating data across remote sites, which hasn’t been feasible over the public Internet due to latency or security concerns, is now feasible?

We help put all these dreams within grasp thanks to Direct Link. Tap directly into our Global Private Network at connection speeds of 1Gbps or 10Gbps to establish a Direct Link into any of our 19 network PoPs (more PoPs are being added regularly). You’ll have the ability to seamlessly extend your private networks directly into SoftLayer. Not only does a Direct Link give you access to one of the world’s largest and fastest private networks, it gives you access to elastically scale your compute and storage on demand.

Many companies look to the cloud as a way to reduce capex and adjust spending on demand but hesitate to move workloads due to latency or security concerns. I'd like to say that latency isn’t even worth thinking twice about at SoftLayer. But don't take my word for it; take a peek at our Looking Glass, and see for yourself. In regards to security, a SoftLayer Direct Link enables you to build and deliver secure services on our private network without having to expose your servers to the public Internet.

For more information on Direct Link and connectivity check out KnowledgeLayer or this blog where the author digs into the technical details and explains how enterprise customers benefit from Direct Link with GRE Tunnels.

I highly recommend reading part one of the series. I outlined many HTML5 techniques that had never been possible with anything but Flash or jQuery before. In this blog I’ll continue with additional techniques that I couldn’t fit into the first blog.

I stand by my previous statement that if we forget what we’ve done and scripted for over two decades with previous versions of HTML and return to the basics with HTML5, we can re-learn a whole new foundation that is sure to make us stronger developers and smarter engineers.

IV. No More Declaring Types!

The sole purpose to develop better scripting and tagging languages is to improve efficiency. I think we can all agree that a smarter language should be able to detect certain attributes and tags automatically . . . well now, HTML5 has taken a huge step toward this.

Now <scripts> and <links> can be FREE of the type attribute!

Instead of:

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/stylesheet.css” />

Or

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”js/javascript.js”></script>

We can now just simply declare:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/stylesheet.css” />

And

<script src=”js/javascript.js”></script>

Something so little . . . yet so awesome!

V. SEMANTICS! Well . . . partial semantics anyway!

HTML5 supports some semantic tags—the most popular being the header and footers.

Whoo! That’s an AWESOME change. Of course there could be a LOT more semantic changes, but we all know those will be coming soon! Until then, we can enjoy what we have.

VI. Video Support without Third-Party Plugins

Many browsers are jumping on board with providing support for the <video> tag, which allows native playback of videos. Gone are the days of having to use javascript/jQuery or *shudder* Flash to embed videos into your pages.

You’ll notice there are TWO <source> tags; this is because browsers like IE and Safari have already started supporting advanced video formats such as mp4. Firefox and Chrome are still in the process, but for now we still need to provide ogv/ogg videos. It’s only a matter of time before all the browsers will support mp4, but this is definitely a huge step forward from third-party plugins!

You should also notice there are two attributes listed in the <video> tag: controls and preload. Controls embed native video playback controls in the video player while preload allows the video to be preloaded, which is GREAT if you have a page just dedicated to viewing the video.

Thanks for tuning in, and let us know what YOUR favorite new features of HTML5 are! And if you’re interested in a gaming series with HTML5, holla at us, and I’ll get on it! I’ve been dying to write a blog series dedicated to teaching HTML5 gaming with the <canvas> tag!